Glastonbury Festival

Reporter’s log: Glastonbury Festival

Manu played Glastonbury Festival in the U.K. for the first time since 2002, wowing over 60,000 people who watched his hour and 20 minute set on the Saturday on the main Pyramid Stage with other headliners being Amy Winehouse and rap superstar Jay-Z. (P.C.)

It’s not often that you see people properly dancing from the front of the Pyramid Stage field to the back – let alone to an artist many of them may never have heard before.

He seems to have combined the world’s most infectious and incendiary styles – punk, reggae, west African beats, flamenco and hip-hop (not all in the same song, but almost).

The end result has a super-fast, super-catchy rhythm that gets hips and feet moving.

Chao himself has an urgency to his voice and presence, regularly thrusting his right arm into the air, urging the crowd to bounce up and down and generally with a strained expression on his face, that it’s hard not to get carried along.

I had no idea what he was singing about most of the time but it must have been something to do with loving each other, saving the world and generally starting a revolution.

After such a feelgood performance, the question is – how will Amy be able to follow it?